Arthur and Sonia Labatt Brain Tumour Research Centre and Division of Pathology, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.Faculty of Medicine, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Epigenetics helps find the bad tumors

Ependymomas are brain tumors that can occur in people of all ages and in different parts of the central nervous system. The prognosis of these tumors does not necessarily correlate with clinical characteristics or even tumor grade, and there are no recurrent genetic mutations that can be used to classify these tumors. To address this problem, Bayliss et al. examined the epigenetics of ependymoma. By doing this, the authors identified some characteristic methylation patterns that correlate with prognosis, including one specific pattern that is also seen in childhood gliomas and associated with more invasive tumors.